For the Cast of ‘Father Knows Best,’ Life Wasn’t Exactly a Sitcom: The Joys and Tragedies Revealed

Robert Young (Jim Anderson)

Born February 22, 1907, in Chicago, Robert actually got his start on the big screen, appearing in more than 100 films between 1931 and 1962, largely in “B” movies which were shot quickly and cheaply, resulting in his appearing in as many as six to eight films a year. He was a contract player at MGM, which pretty much meant he had to do any project the studio assigned to him. While he scored some strong roles during that time, once the contract ended and he started appearing in films for other studios, he was able to tap into darker characters, which were among his most critically acclaimed performances. Yet, despite all he had done and all he imagined he could still do, his career went into decline and, by the early 1950s, he simply wasn’t in demand any longer.

TV Beckons

Which is the point that television entered his life. The popularity of Father Knows Best on the radio made it an ideal candidate to be adapted to TV, though the actor had a very specific vision in mind for the character of insurance salesman Jim Anderson. In Jeff Kisseloff’s book The Box, the actor noted that at the time he’d said, “‘I’d like to do a family show. I’d like to be the father, but not a boob. I don’t want to do William Bendix on The Life of Riley.’ Out of that came Father Knows Best.”

The Burden of Being Jim Anderson

Obviously it worked, but not without a cost in that the show created so idealized a version of Robert Young, that it’s something that began to affect him in his real life. “I wasn’t Jim Anderson,” he said, “but it was hard for the public to accept that, and it got to be a pain in the ass. The Andersons came out of my conversations about what we thought would be representative of a middle-class American family, if there was such a thing. There probably isn’t, but that was what we were looking for. People did perceive it as real life. I know that. I don’t know if people compared themselves unfavorably to us, but maybe it helped with the realization that a family can exist without killing each other.”

‘Marcus Welby, M.D.’

In a sense, lightning struck again for Robert when he was hired to play the lead in Marcus Welby, M.D., a show currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, running from 1969-1976, and spawning the TV movies The Return of Marcus Welby, M.D. (1984) and Marcus Welby, M.D.: A Holiday Affair (1988). James Brolin costarred in the series as Steve Kiley, M.D., a younger doctor.

After Marcus Welby ended its run, Robert didn’t do a lot of acting beyond commercials for Sanka coffee and the acclaimed — but controversial — TV movie Mercy or Murder about assisted suicide. Some thought the problem was typecasting and that the studios wouldn’t cast him. He didn’t see it that way.

Acting Challenges

“The studios and the networks don’t typecast players,” he told The New York Times. “The public typecast players, and if you fight that, you’re fighting fate. Actors always want to express their versatility. At times I felt that and I tried playing a villain, and I played to empty theaters. I started out at the Pasadena Playhouse, and there they cast you in anything. You could be the romantic lead one night and a heavy the next night. That’s great training for an actor. But when you get out into the professional world, a pattern or image is established quickly. You eventually find yourself in a little niche, and there’s nothing you can do about it … The parts were becoming what the networks euphemistically call ‘cameos.’ I call them bits, and not very good bits. Basically, they are just using your name to sucker in a few viewers. I would do a two-page part if it had some guts to it, some impact on the story. But to walk in and say, ‘When is lunch ready?’ — that’s the way I started out in films, and it’s not the way I want to finish.”

Battling His Inner Demons

What the public certainly didn’t realize during the time of both Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby, M.D. was that Robert was fighting acute depression, the struggle with which ultimately led him down the path of alcoholism. It wasn’t until doctors ran key tests on him that it was discovered he suffered from a chemical imbalance and he was prescribed with medication that helped — for a time.

Channeling Pain to Progress

In 1991, it was revealed that, not only had he attempted suicide, but he had tried to convince his wife, Elizabeth (who he had been married to for more than 40 years at the time), to join him in a suicide pact. He did recover — much of the strength to do so coming from the outpouring of love and support from the fans he didn’t even know he still had — and spent much of his remaining time speaking openly about his personal struggles in the hope of helping others. His efforts also resulted in the passage of the 708 Illinois Tax Referendum, which established a property tax to support mental health programs in his home state, eventually expanding to Iowa as well.

Elizabeth Young passed away in 1994, and Robert joined her on July 21, 1998, dying of respiratory failure.

Jane Wyatt (Margaret Anderson)

Playing Margaret, the matriarch of the Anderson household, was actress Jane Wyatt. Born August 12, 1910, in Mahwah, New Jersey, she got her start on the Broadway stage as an understudy to actress Rose Hobart in Trade Winds. Additional stage work led to her being cast the 1934 film One More River, followed three years later by Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. Additional film roles include Gentleman’s Agreement, None but the Lonely Heart, Boomerang, House by the River and Task Force.

Reel Family

Despite the acclaim of her film work, it’s her role on Father Knows Best for which she is most known (and for which she won three Emmys). Of the show, she reflected in a 1989 interview, “Our shows were written to be entertaining, but the writers had something to say. Every script always solved a little problem that was universal. It appealed to everyone. I think the world is hankering for a family. People may want to be free, but they still want a nuclear family.”

As to it being criticized for not being a reflection of real life, she noted, “We thought it was. It is what we wanted to do for our children. We can’t have it exactly like life; it would be too boring. We all thought it was life — as we wanted it to be.”

Mr. Spock’s Mommy

Next to Margaret, Jane’s most famous role has to be that of Amanda, the mother of Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek. She appeared in an episode of the series called “Journey to Babel,” and reprised the character in the 1986 feature film, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. As reported by StarTrek.com, she commented, “The three big movies or shows for which I get fan mail are Star Trek, Father Knows Best and Lost Horizon. But Star Trek is the oddest of them all. Complete strangers come up and call me ‘Amanda.’ Once I got off the plane in Iceland, where I was going fishing, and somebody down below yelled ‘Amanda!’ Well, I didn’t know who Amanda was until I realized that was my name in Star Trek. It’s absolutely crazy!”

Personal Happiness

Following Father Knows Best, Jane made a wide diversity of guest starring appearances on other shows. In her private life, she was married just shy of 65 years to her husband, Edgar Bethune Ward. Together they had two sons, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Jane suffered a minor stroke in the 1990s, but made a strong recovery. She eventually died on October 20, 2006, at the age of 96.

Elinor Donahue (Betty ‘Princess’ Anderson)

Born in April 1937 in Tacoma, Washington, Elinor has actually had recurring roles on a number of Classic TV series since the end of Father Knows Best, all of which she’s discussed with us previously in an in-depth exclusive interview. She had gotten her start in dancing-chorus film roles beginning at the age of 5. Elinor worked in vaudeville before scoring small parts in a number of films, among them Love is Better Than Ever, Three Daring Daughters and Girls Town.

Then of course came Father Knows Best in 1954, the appeal of which she had gotten right from the start. “It’s the sweetness and the kindness that people had toward one another,” Elinor proposes. “It has a warmth and loving energy to it that was very special. There was no mean spiritedness to it. If anybody was mean-spirited, I think it was Princess occasionally. She was always on a crusade of some sort and kind of huffy about everything.”

More Classic TV Roles

From Father Knows Best, she would play a love interest for Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and one for Tony Randall’s Felix Unger on The Odd Couple. Along the way, she (as did her TV mom) would also guest star on a memorable episode of the original Star Trek (“Metamorphosis”). Over the decades, she appeared in many other sitcoms, sometimes recurring, but always working. Her last acting role to date was as Judge Marie Anderson on four episodes of the daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless.

Billy Gray (James ‘Bud’ Anderson Jr.)

Prior to Father Knows Best, Billy Gray (born William Thomas Gray on January 13, 1938, in Los Angeles) had built up a pretty extensive resume. At the age of 13 he appeared in Burt Lancaster’s Jim Thorpe — All American, followed by the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still and Talk About a Stranger. On television, he had starred in one of the two pilots produced for the Annie Oakley TV series, but when he wasn’t brought along for the series itself, he opted instead for Father Knows Best — though in 1953 he did appear in the film By the Light of the Silvery Moon, The Girl Next Door and All I Desire, while also making a small screen appearance on the George Reeves series The Adventures of Superman.

Few Roles Following the Series

Once Father Knows Best completed its run, he went right back to work without missing a beat. Between 1960 and 1962, he appeared on seven television series (including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Bachelor Father) and the 1961 film The Explosive Generation. Things shifted, however, in 1962 when he was arrested for marijuana possession (a really big deal back then), which seriously impacted on his reputation and career. As a result, the roles definitely slowed down. In addition to the Father Knows Best reunion movies, his last two films were 1979’s Love and Bullets and 1996’s The Vampyre Wars.

Following Other Pursuits

Billy did take the downturn of his acting career and made something positive out of it, pursuing his other passion of racing competitively at dirt tracks in Southern California, which he did from 1970 to 1995. He is also co-owner of BigRock Engineering, which markets a variety of products, include several that he invented himself.

Not a Fan

Through everything, though, one gets the impression that when you consider the fans of Father Knows Best out in the world, you shouldn’t necessarily count him among them. While talking to go-star.com in 1983, he commented, “I wish there was some way I could tell the kids not to believe it. The dialogue, the situations, the characters — they were all totally false. The show did everyone a disservice. The girls were always trained to use their feminine wiles, to pretend to be helpless to attract men. The show contributed to a lot of the problems between men and women that we see today. I think we were all well motivated, but what we did was run a hoax. Father Knows Best purported to be a reasonable facsimile of life. And the bad thing is, the model is so deceitful. It usually revolved around not wanting to tell the truth, either out of embarrassment, or not wanting to hurt someone. If I could say anything to make up for all the years I lent myself to [that], it would be, ‘You Know Best.'”

Lauren Chapin (Kathy ‘Kitten’ Anderson)

The youngest child in the Anderson brood was “Kitten,” as portrayed by Lauren Chapin. Born May 23, 1945, in Los Angeles, her acting prior to and during Father Knows Best consisted of three episodes of Lux Video Theatre and one episode of Fireside Theatre. After the show, and not including the reunion movies, she appeared in a 1960 episode of General Electric Theater, the 1980 movie Scout’s Honor and eight episodes of the 2016 TV show School Bus Diaries.

It must be said, that of all the cast members, it seems that Lauren has suffered the most throughout her life. Through various reports it was revealed that she was sexually abused prior to, during and after Father Knows Best; she was married at 16, separated two years later and divorced five years after that. She suffered numerous miscarriages and career setbacks (i.e. she was so typecast from Father Knows Best that she couldn’t land other roles), that she found herself spiraling down a dark path.

Fighting Back From the Edge

As she told People in 1981, “I wasn’t prepared for the real world out there [after the show].” Additionally, “I don’t remember my mother ever kissing me, and I wanted kids of my own to love. I really felt inadequate as a woman.”

In a separate 1983 interview with the Reading Eagle she added, “When Father Knows Best finished, everything finished. I couldn’t get a job. I’d been typecast as Kathy Anderson. The more I didn’t work, the more my mother drank and the more belligerent I became. I started running away from home. I became an incorrigible child. My mother always made me dress like Kathy Anderson. She would never let me look like Lauren Chapin. She’d always put those pigtails on and bobby socks. I’d take off my socks and roll up my jeans. I’d say I want to be me, but my mom would say, ‘How could you shame me like that? You can’t be you. You’ve got to be Kathy Anderson.’”

A Challenging Life

By Lauren’s own account, she spent 15 years living through broken marriages, drug addiction and jail sentences for a variety of charges. She ended up in a rehabilitation center in California for narcotic addicts and it took a year for her to become drug-free. As she told the magazine, “I saw these people walking around wearing diapers and baby bonnets and sucking from bottles, and I thought, Oh my God, I’m in the nuthouse, and I’ll never get out. But they train you to give up all your identity and go back to the beginning. A lot of people don’t make it, but the ones who do, make it for life.”

And she did manage to turn things around for herself. In 1989 she cowrote the book Father Does Know Best: The Lauren Chapin Story, currently manages singers and actors and actually performs in what has been described as a live, interactive version of Father Knows Best for conventions, cruise lines and a variety of other events. And on top of that, she’s an ordained evangelist.

“All my life,” she said, “I’ve wanted to be loved. God’s love is the most complete love, and I think that’s what I was looking for.”